Using Strategies Elites Understand: Divestment as an Approach to Social Change

ABSTRACT

Over the past 50 years, student activists and community organizers on college campuses have advocated for divestment as a strategy to enact necessary change. These activists and organizers are often tasked to confront the higher education elite, such as trustees, with these demands. Higher education institutions will only continue to face immense pressures to be humane organizations with the public interest at its core. This article reviews the literature on divestment as a social activist strategy and its use in higher education. In addition to the political importance of divestment, reinvestment is emerging as a significant complement to activists’ demands. We advance an argument for how divestment and reinvestment can inform a new paradigm for higher education finance to stimulate future activism.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jude Paul Matias Dizon

Jude Paul Matias Dizon is an assistant professor of higher education and student affairs at the Graduate School of Education, Rutgers University. His research broadly examines the contradictions facing students of color as both desired and unwanted subjects in the neoliberal university.

Jordan Harper

Jordan Harper is a Ph.D. candidate in the Rossier School of Education and a research assistant in the Pullias Center for Higher Education at the University of Southern California. His primary research interests include leadership, non-tenure-track/contingent faculty, non-instructional support staff, and student affairs. He also has a vested interest in the ways neoliberalism and whiteness/white supremacy create and maintain the conditions that animate contemporary higher education.

Adrianna Kezar

Adrianna Kezar is the Dean’s Professor of Leadership, Wilbur-Kieffer Professor of Higher Education at the University of Southern California, and Director of the Pullias Center for Higher Education. At the Pullias Center, Kezar directs the Delphi Project on the Changing Faculty and Student Success and is an international expert on the changing faculty.